Harriet Martineau

• 1. Introduction

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  Harriet Martineau was born on the 12th of June 1802 in Norwich, England, the sixth of eight children in a Unitarian family of French Huguenot ancestry. When she was not yet thirty, her father's textile business collapsed and her father died, leaving her to support herself in an era when women writers were expected to confine themselves to romance and domestic fiction. She chose instead to write about political economy, abolitionism, sociology, and atheism, becoming one of the most widely read social thinkers in the English-speaking world. How did a partially deaf woman from a provincial merchant family come to outsell Charles Dickens, advise the reform of Poor Laws, unsettle the Darwin household, and eventually be called the greatest American abolitionist at a ceremony in Boston? Those are the questions this documentary sets out to answer.

• 2. A Difficult Beginning

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  Thomas Martineau, Harriet's father, served as deacon of the Octagon Chapel in Norwich from 1797 and ran a textile manufacturing business whose fortunes would shape the family for decades. He taught Harriet Latin, while her mother Elizabeth taught her French, and her brother Thomas taught her mathematics and writing. Being schooled at home by siblings often led to mockery, but a small school run by a man named Perry offered Harriet her first genuinely positive and non-judgmental learning environment. Late in life she credited Perry's school as the catalyst for her intellectual development.

  Her mother Elizabeth, described by the writer Diana Postlethwaite as having a strained and affection-poor relationship with Harriet, urged all her children to be well read while simultaneously opposing female pedantics with what Postlethwaite called a sharp eye for feminine propriety. Harriet's daughters could never be seen in public with a pen in their hand. The conservatism was not total, however; Harriet's sister Rachel ran her own Unitarian academy, counting the artist Hilary Bonham Carter among her students.

  At a boarding school run by her aunt and uncle Kentish in Bristol, Harriet began the self-directed research that would define her career, studying Latin, Greek, and Italian on her own. She did not write often until her brother James went off to Manchester New College of York in 1821. Separated from him, she followed his suggestion and took up writing as a way to cope with their distance. That practical remedy for loneliness launched one of the most prolific careers of the nineteenth century.

• 3. Making a Living from Words

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  In 1821, Harriet Martineau began writing anonymously for the Monthly Repository, a Unitarian periodical. Her first contribution was titled "Female Writers of Practical Divinity", and by 1823 she had published Devotional Exercises and Addresses, Prayers and Hymns. She was already losing her senses of taste and smell, and was deaf and dependent on an ear trumpet by the age of twelve, though she reportedly delayed using the trumpet until her late twenties to avoid harassment.

  The family's textile business failed in 1829, and Martineau, then twenty-seven years old, stepped outside the traditional bounds of feminine propriety to earn a living. She entered three essay contests run by the Unitarian Association and won prizes in all three. Her regular contributions to the Monthly Repository established her as a reliable freelance writer. In her autobiography she would later reflect that her father's business failure was "one of the best things that ever happened to us", giving her the chance to "truly live instead of vegetate".

  The work that made her name was Illustrations of Political Economy, a fictional series intended to help the general public understand the ideas of Adam Smith. The publisher launched the first volume in February 1832 in an edition of only 1,500 copies, expecting modest sales. It quickly became highly successful and would steadily outsell the work of Charles Dickens. By 1834, the monthly sales had reached 10,000 copies at a time when a sale of 2,000 to 3,000 copies of a work of fiction was considered highly successful. Martineau then agreed to continue the series as monthly stories over two years, bringing in her brother James as a collaborator. Subsequent volumes offered fictional tutorials on the ideas of James Mill, Jeremy Bentham, David Ricardo, and Thomas Robert Malthus, the last of whom shaped her thinking on population dynamics.

• 4. London, Darwin, and the Abolitionists

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  Coming to London around 1830, Martineau joined the social circle of the Reverend William Johnson Fox, editor of the Monthly Repository. That introduction led to Erasmus Alvey Darwin, older brother to Charles. By November 1832, she had moved to London permanently and her circle of acquaintances had widened to include Henry Hallam, Harriet Taylor, Thomas Malthus, John Stuart Mill, Edward Bulwer-Lytton, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, and the Carlyles, among others. Florence Nightingale, Charlotte Bronte, Elizabeth Gaskell, George Eliot, and Charles Dickens came later.

  Between 1834 and 1836, after finishing the economics series, Martineau made a long visit to the United States, traveling from New York to Boston, and from Chicago through to Atlanta and elsewhere in Georgia. She met James Madison, the former US president, at his home at Montpelier, and studied the emerging schools for the education of girls in Boston. Her support for abolitionism, then widely unpopular across the country, caused controversy that her books Society in America (1837) and How to Observe Morals and Manners (1838) only deepened.

  In October 1836, soon after returning from the voyage of the Beagle, Charles Darwin went to London to stay with his brother Erasmus and found him spending his days driving out Martineau, who had just returned from America. Charles wrote to his sister that "our only protection from so admirable a sister-in-law is in her working him too hard." He noted that she intended to explain her notions about marriage to Erasmus, which included "perfect equality of rights", and doubted whether "it will be equality in practice." Their father Robert was concerned that as a potential daughter-in-law she was too extreme in her politics. In early December 1836, Charles called on Martineau and remarked in a letter that she was "very agreeable and managed to talk on a most wonderful number of subjects, considering the limited time." Some historians note that Martineau's earlier popularisation of Malthus's theories of population control may have helped convince Charles to read Malthus, which provided breakthrough ideas for his nascent theory of evolution.

• 5. Illness, Mesmerism, and the Sickroom

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  In 1839, during a visit to Continental Europe, Martineau was diagnosed with a uterine tumour. She visited her brother-in-law, Thomas Michael Greenhow, a celebrated doctor in Newcastle upon Tyne, multiple times; on one occasion she stayed for six months in the Greenhow family house at 28 Eldon Square. Immobile and confined to a couch, she was cared for by her mother, then purchased her own house and hired a nurse.

  She moved downriver to Tynemouth, taking a room at Mrs Halliday's boarding house at 57 Front Street, where she stayed for nearly five years from the 16th of March 1840. From a window fitted with a telescope she watched the sandy beach "where there are frequent wrecks", boys flying kites on the heath above the rocks, and at night, the Northern Lights darting and quivering above the stars. The property was later named the Martineau Guest House.

  During these years she wrote prolifically. In 1841 she published The Playfellow, a series of four novels for children. In 1844 she published Life in the Sickroom: Essays by an Invalid, an autobiographical reflection on illness that she used to argue for a patient's control over her own space. The British and Foreign Medical Review dismissed the work, recommending instead that patients follow "unconditional submission" to doctors' advice. Critics suggested that, as she was an invalid, her mind must also be sick. Martineau declined a pension on the civil list for a second time during this period, fearing to compromise her political independence.

  In 1844 she underwent a course of mesmerism and returned to health within a few months. She eventually published an account in 16 Letters on Mesmerism, which caused friction with her brother-in-law Thomas Michael Greenhow and his wife Elizabeth, her sister. Some historians attribute her recovery not to mesmerism but to a shift in the positioning of her tumour so that it no longer obstructed other organs. Martineau herself credited mesmerism with her cure. Notable visitors during the Tynemouth years included Richard Cobden and Thomas and Jane Carlyle.

• 6. Atheism, Travel, and the Knoll

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  In 1845, Martineau left Tynemouth for Ambleside in the Lake District, where she designed and oversaw the construction of a house she called The Knoll, made a Grade II listed building in 1974. She moved into the house in April 1846. The following year she toured Egypt, Palestine, and Syria with friends, an experience that transformed her religious convictions. Standing on a prominence looking out across the Nile and desert to the tombs of the dead, she arrived at what she described as a realisation about the origins of mortuary ideas in the conflict between the Nile and the desert.

  On her return she published Eastern Life, Present and Past (1848). The book argued that as humanity passed through successive world religions, the conception of the deity grew progressively more abstract, with philosophic atheism as the ultimate destination. The publisher John Murray rejected the book for its "infidel tendency". Her biographer Florence Fenwick Miller described it as a work where "all her best moral and intellectual faculties were exerted." Scholar Billie Melman noted that the book was also the first feminine travelogue proper that was not an account of a pilgrimage, making it an early landmark in female academia and in the growing field of Egyptology.

  In March 1851, Martineau edited a volume of Letters on the Laws of Man's Nature and Development, written as correspondence between herself and the self-styled scientist Henry G. Atkinson. The book expounded philosophical atheism and gave prominent space to mesmerism and clairvoyance. Literary London reacted with outrage, and the book caused a lasting division between Martineau and her beloved brother James, who had become a Unitarian cleric. From 1852 to 1866 she contributed regularly to The Daily News, writing as many as six leaders a week and producing more than 1,600 articles for the paper in total. When Darwin's On the Origin of Species was published in 1859, Erasmus Darwin sent a copy to Martineau at The Knoll. At fifty-eight, she wrote back that it was "an unspeakable satisfaction" to see the full manifestation of Charles Darwin's earnestness, sagacity, and industry.

• 7. Founding Sociology

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  Auguste Comte coined the name sociology and published his foundational exposition Cours de Philosophie Positive in 1839. When Martineau undertook an English translation, she produced not a literal rendering but a condensed two-volume edition published in 1853 as The Positive Philosophy of Auguste Comte. The achievement was remarkable enough that Comte himself recommended her volumes to his students in preference to his own. Some scholars regard Martineau as the first female sociologist.

  Her own sociological methods had been on display as early as 1837 in Society in America, and she set out her theoretical framework in How to Observe Morals and Manners (1838). She believed that general social laws operate across all societies and that any serious study of a society must include every aspect of it: key political, religious, and social institutions alongside the lives of women and the domestic sphere. She was the first sociologist to study marriage, children, religious life, and race relations as scholarly subjects.

  Anthony Giddens and Simon Griffiths later argued that Martineau remains a neglected founder of sociology. Her call for sociologists to move beyond observation and actively benefit society placed her squarely in a reforming tradition. A Complete Guide to the English Lakes, published in 1855 and in its fourth edition by 1876, served as the definitive guidebook for the region for twenty-five years, effectively replacing William Wordsworth's 1810 guide and remaining in common use until the publication of M. J. B. Baddeley's Thorough Guide to the English Lake District in 1880.

• 8. Legacy

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  Harriet Martineau died of bronchitis at The Knoll on the 27th of June 1876, aged seventy-four. An autopsy revealed an ovarian cyst that had grown to twelve inches in diameter. She was buried alongside her mother in Key Hill Cemetery in Hockley, Birmingham. She had completed her autobiography in three months during 1855, expecting her life to end from heart disease, then lived another two decades; the book was published posthumously in 1877.

  In the autobiographical sketch published by The Daily News on the 29th of June 1876, Martineau assessed herself with characteristic directness: "Her original power was nothing more than was due to earnestness and intellectual clearness within a certain range. With small imaginative and suggestive powers, and therefore nothing approaching to genius, she could see clearly what she did see, and give a clear expression to what she had to say. In short, she could popularise while she could neither discover nor invent."

  Wendell Phillips, unveiling a statue of Martineau in December 1883 at the Old South Meeting House in Boston, called her the "greatest American abolitionist". A statue by the sculptor Anne Whitney was donated to Wellesley College in 1886 but destroyed in a fire in 1914; a plaster copy of the head survives in the Davis Museum at Wellesley College. The first volume of History of Woman Suffrage, published in 1881, inscribed her name among the women whose "earnest lives and fearless words, in demanding political rights for women" had been a constant inspiration to its editors. Her name is also listed on the east face of the Reformers' Memorial in Kensal Green Cemetery in London, and the National Portrait Gallery holds nine portraits of her. The Martineau Society continues to highlight the principles of freedom of conscience she shared with her brother James.